The Lost Weekend

I’m not enjoying these Friday night internationals. It’s the latest in a string of attempts by the God of Television to fuck about with my weekends.

If there’s an England match of a Friday night that means that Saturday stretches out before you, vast and unenticing , like a fat lass’s nightdress, and you can’t wait for Sunday to arrive. Only you forgot that Sunday is as empty as a Bedouin’s beerhall.  

Jeez it’s dull. I even found myself getting drawn into the latest bout of Murray v Djokovic and given those bastards kept me up til two in the morning not long ago I couldn’t last the three and a half hours. It’s exhausting. There comes a time when that level of competence becomes almost tedious.

It reminds me of watching that British bloke at the end of the Olympic shooting. Wilson the lad’s name was, and he was in the double-trap summat or other and it was so rare for him or any of his competitors to miss that you ended up in this mixture of hypnosis and agony. I tell you it’s no fun.

Of course there’s always Formula 1, which the Blue Bell Clarksonettes tell me is the most exciting championship race for years. These jeans-and-jacketed petrol-heads like nothing more than the sound of high-pitched chain-saws and the smell of a pit-babes leather-clad perspiration. The twats.

I’m of the opinion that Formula 1 is the most underwhelming, overrated, self-aggrandising trade fair in the world. Little pumped-up billboards masquerading as drivers as they whizz around in their pimped little proxy pricks. Yawwwwn!!! If you like it you haven’t quite got over the thrill of getting your first matchbox toy and pushing it along the carpet shouting ‘vvvvvvrrrooooom!’

Having said that, I’d’ve rather watched Lewis Hamilton talk about particle physics than watch the actual football match I witnessed on Friday night.

England trotted out against possibly the worst assemblage of playing personnel ever to take to a field since my brother took a claw hammer to my Middlesbrough subbuteo team in 1973. Playing a rigid 9-1-0 formation they held on against an England team who think Painting by Numbers passes for creativity.

Honestly these lads couldn’t unlock an open door. The amount of times they hurtled into a quick one-two on the edge of the box only for it to dissipate into a three-four-fall-on-the-floor beggared belief.

Rooney was skipper which is good as, well, you know, he’s of unimpeachable character and the one before last was that dodgy geezer… you know the [whisper] racist… I mean, that bloke who isn’t a racist – some of his best friends are black – it’s just he says racist things… occasionally… on telly…

Anyway, Wazza took the armband as happily presumably as he takes analysis of his barnet, which is quite frankly ludicrous. It looks like the work of some high functioning chimps on a macramé course. It also makes him look curiously middle-aged, as if Tom Cleverley drafted him cos his Dad went to school with the bloke. I notice he hasn’t appeared in any of them before and after ads for trichology. The lad looked better with his bonce shaved.

Apart from Walcott getting Schumachered by the San Marino keeper there was nowt to report for the first thirty minutes. It’s hard to understand why Hodgson thought it sensible to play a back four, when a back two might have been overly-cautious. But then Woy isn’t about to get all flamboyant on us, is he?  The one thing he knows is that our lads like it nice n simple. We don’t want too much of that total football malarkey. 4-4-2. That’ll do.

It’s difficult, too, to draw any conclusions from the game, apart from the fact that based on that performance there must be only 14 men of playing age in San Marino. Oxbow-Chambermaid did his bit but he’s not quite ready for the midfield maestro role just yet. Wellbeck nabbed a couple but I always feel he approaches the six-yard box with all the lethal intent of a kitten in pyjamas.

I spent most of the game shouting ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ while our lads kidded themselves they were in some sort of Wengerised training session while a coach on the side shouted ‘Walk it in! Walk it in!’

Poland awaits. They’re no great shakes, are they, and the lad Blatchukowsky or however you spell it is out. It’s one of them games where England will have to find a way to lose it. I expect the England team to be: Hart, Johnson, Jagielka, Lescott, Cole, Milner, Gerrard, Carrick, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Rooney, Defoe. Carroll will be in the ‘throw the big bloke on’ role so beloved of Crouchy.

And thankfully we’ll all be back to wall-to-wall footy in five days’ time thank God. It might also drown out the horrible muttering, gurning, yodelling continuing spectral nightmare of one Jimmy Saville OBE. I, like many children, wrote to the old fiddler to have him fix it for me (a training session with Jack Charlton’s Middlesbrough, as it happens). My wish did not come true. But let me write another letter just for old time’s sake.

‘Dear Jim, (now then, now then) could you fix it for me (goodness gracious) and millions of others to dig up your corpse and trample it to dust, you monstrous and indulged piece of shit. Yours sincerely, Everyone.’

Only the God-fearing amongst you will imagine that he hasn’t got away with it. The rest of us will be cursing him. And Lance Armstrong too. Not that the latter’s crimes compare, but there are similarities. In both cases, charity became a sort of sainted cloak to hide behind, and in both cases everyone knew they were guilty. Sadly.